Monthly Archives: July 2014

This one’s been finished relatively on time for a change. Not much else to say at the moment so let’s jump to the results.

Essentials

Lifestyle

Savings

Target score:

50%

30%

20%

Actual score:

57.8%

24.5%

17.7%

As with last month, I’ve managed to keep my any lifestyle purchases under the 30% target, which was pretty nice. But again it’s ended up being the Essentials that’s gone over-budget. Nearly all of that is from the usual bills, food etc. I’m not sure I can get it down much lower without cutting my costs right down by moving house, but I don’t plan on doing that again until I’m ready to buy. I also managed to cut down the total cash withdrawn in half, and track what I was spending it on for all but 1%. I think that’s as close to zero as I can reasonably manage, it’ll never hit exactly zero as there will always be cash withdrawn that wasn’t spent that month, or money spent that came from last month. For the most part though it should balance out.

This is the closest I’ve gotten to hitting my 20% target for my savings this month, and if it wasn’t for a visit to the emergency vets I would’ve reached it with room to spare. As I mentioned in my last post, my solution for this is to create an extra emergency piggy bank which I can put an amount of money into every month and use that for any big expensive tasks like pet operations, unexpected travel costs, or anything that would fit the bill of “emergency”. A small amount extra going out each month won’t stop me from reaching my targets and it’ll cover me for those (ideally rare) times when I need to spend a lot of money in a hurry.

As I also expect to get out of my overdraft this month I’ve decided to give myself some money for buying the occasional nice thing like a new game or piece of tech which I’ve avoided so far this year. Instead of just taking more money out of my main account I’m going to cut how much I’m putting into my “Big one offs” piggybank and put it into a brand new piggybank. That way I can leave the Big one offs account for anything really big when it’s eventually needed.

The Open University budgeting course is going well. I was hoping to have finished by this point, but I’m running a couple of weeks behind. So far I’ve learnt a lot about difference aspects of saving, as well as what best to do with my savings once I have them, but I’ll still need to do some extra research into some of the areas once I’m ready to commit. I did learn about a relatively recent concept called peer-to-peer lending which seems like a great idea in principle, but sounds like it has the potential to go very wrong one day. Right now it’s shown itself to be pretty safe and there’s very few horror stories around it, so it looks like it “might” be a good investment option. If I’ve learnt anything about finances so far though it’s never to rely on a single method for saving. If I do get out of my overdraft then I’ll have to do something with the leftover money, as just leaving it in my main account will make it lose value just from inflation. I’ll decide what exactly to do with it at the end of the month and talk about it in my next post.

Overall, this has been my best month yet, and barring any more emergencies it should only get better from this point on.